A Western Heart

What social and medical science has to say about Obama's push to "desegregate" white suburbs

In their constant determination to go against the grain of what they see in the society around them, Leftists have long argued that contact between people of different races is a good thing. They started that ball rolling not long after WWII, when it emerged that black/white contact in the American military during WWII had fostered some inter-racial friendships, even though the forces were at that time largely segregated racially. That the military is not much like society at large and that war is not peace were "overlooked".

So the "contact hypothesis" was born and thrived for many years in social science writing. As early as 1974, however, I was arguing in the academic literature that the converse is true: The more you see of other races, the less you like them. Nothing I wrote in the research literature on the subject had any influence, however. It took Robert Putnam to blow the nonsense out of the water.

Putnam was a well-credentialled Leftist whose early illustrations of declining "social capital" in the USA had attracted a lot of interest. In that work he showed how social interactions outside the home had shrivelled up since the '60s. People were "hunkering down" and "bowling alone". People were increasing less trustful of their environment and reluctant to set foot outside their own front door.

He proposed several reasons for this effect but omitted the obvious one: The "liberation" of blacks accomplished by the Civil Rights Act and the destruction of racial segregation that took place in the '60s. Whatever else it did, Jim Crow kept blacks significantly subdued and, in particular, not dangerous to whites. A black man getting "uppity" could in some cases end up hanging from a tree in those days. The incidence of violence among groups of sub-Saharan Africans is uniformly high at all times and in all nations so there was still a high level of crime among blacks in the Jim Crow era but it was almost entirely black-on-black, as, indeed, it still largely is.

I am not of course defending Jim Crow or advocating a return to it. I am simply heing a good social scientist and noting that, after it abolition, life became more dangerous for whites. And it was because the world outside was more dangerous that white Americans, in particular, became more hesitant about setting foot outside their front door, particularly at night. They watched TV instead.

Eventually, however, Putnam felt he had to address the racial facts that kept bobbing up in his data. After years of hesitation, he dropped his bombshell: The more ethnic diversity there was in a community, the less was the social interaction and co-operation. It was when you had black neighbors that you stayed at home as much as you could. So much for the contact hypothesis!

So "diversity" brings on social isolation. But social isolation is a very bad thing. Ever since the work of sociologist Durkheim in the late 19th century, researchers have known that alienation from those around you has serious psychiatric consequences. It is, for instance, a major cause of suicide.

And if social isolation is troublesome to us in advanced societies, it is even more troublesome in less sophisticated societies. Australian Aborigines are, for instance, compulsively social. They have a strong need for the physical company of others of their kind. Put one in isolation in jail and he will do his level best to kill himself. An erring Aboriginal can be "sung" to death by his tribe. The singing consists of the men of the tribe sitting down together and chanting disapproval of the person for hours on end. The target of such chanting will simply die.

So from the literature of both anthropology and sociology, we know that social isolation is bad for your health -- bad to the point of being fatal. I was pleased therefore to see the article from the medical literature below which confirms how fatal social isolation can be. It's no wonder so many Americans avoid "diversity" by "white flight" and it's very threatening that Obama is trying to "diversify" existing white suburbs.

So an obscure article in a medical journal has great relevance to a current "hot" political issue. Under the new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH), announced by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently, Obama wants to plop down "affordable" housing in the middle of better-off communities. In conjunction with Putnam's findings, the article below would suggest that more white suicides will result if he succeeds. Leftism can be fatal in all sorts of ways -- large and small.

Association Between Social Integration and Suicide Among Women in the United States

By Alexander C. Tsai, MD et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance: Suicide is one of the top 10 leading causes of mortality among middle-aged women. Most work in the field emphasizes the psychiatric, psychological, or biological determinants of suicide.

Objective: To estimate the association between social integration and suicide.

Design, Setting, and Participants: We used data from the Nurses’ Health Study, an ongoing nationwide prospective cohort study of nurses in the United States. Beginning in 1992, a population-based sample of 72 607 nurses 46 to 71 years of age were surveyed about their social relationships. The vital status of study participants was ascertained through June 1, 2010.

Exposures: Social integration was measured with a 7-item index that included marital status, social network size, frequency of contact with social ties, and participation in religious or other social groups.

Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome of interest was suicide, defined as deaths classified using the codes E950 to E959 from the International Classification of Diseases, Eighth Revision.

Results: During more than 1.2 million person-years of follow-up (1992-2010), there were 43 suicide events. The incidence of suicide decreased with increasing social integration. In a multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression model, the relative hazard of suicide was lowest among participants in the highest category of social integration (adjusted hazard ratio, 0.23 [95% CI, 0.09-0.58]) and second-highest category of social integration (adjusted hazard ratio, 0.26 [95% CI, 0.09-0.74]). Increasing or consistently high levels of social integration were associated with a lower risk of suicide. These findings were robust to sensitivity analyses that accounted for poor mental health and serious physical illness.

Conclusions and Relevance: Women who were socially well integrated had a more than 3-fold lower risk for suicide over 18 years of follow-up.

Attempts to stop people booing aggressive part-Aboriginal football player Adam Goodes have backfired. An attempt was made to suppress the booing by branding it as "racist". That caused great offence among the many who simply thought Goodes was a bad sportsman. The outcome was a wave of statements in reply about Goodes being offensive --e.g. here.

I think I should mention that AFL legend Jason Akermanis got booed a lot in his day. But unlike Adam Goodes, Akermanis is white. So, you know. Not racist booing. Akermanis has in fact called Goodes a "sook", which translates fairly well as "unmanly" -- a very bad image in football.

The criticisms have now got to Goodes and he appears to have departed football. After being accused of being racists, the fans would undoubtedly erupt into a storm of booing if ever Goodes stepped onto the field again. His position really is untenable.

Goodes seems to me to be less than half Aboriginal in terms of ancestry but, if he were a tribal Aborigine, a wave of disapproval would certainly weigh heavily upon him. Tribal Aborigines can be, and still are, "sung" to death. The singing consists of the men of the tribe sitting down together and chanting disapproval of the person for hours on end. The target of such chanting will simply die. So it is probable that Goodes is feeling very distressed by the turn of events.

The Left however will see Goodes as a victim and see his eclipse as proof that all Australians are racists. He will be celebrated in song and dance for decades as a Leftist hero. There will undoubtedly be Horst Wessel songs about him. That he might have deserved his eclipse and that he might be to blame for his own downfall will not be considered

As it has been revealed AFL star Adam Goodes has been granted indefinite leave over the controversy involving 'racist' fans who boo him, the mother of the girl he first called out has demanded an apology and said he should 'man up and take' the abuse.

The woman, identified only as Joanne, said the abuse Goodes receives from fans on a weekly basis stems from how he treated her daughter - who racially abused the player in 2013 when she called him an 'ape'.

'If he hadn't have done it he wouldn't be having the problems he'd be having now,' according to the Sydney Morning Herald. 'He probably should apologise because maybe he should have picked his target a little bit better.

'I don't think Julia was treated fairly at all. It was the way he carried on on the ground that made them do what they did. If he hadn't have carried on like a pork chop it wouldn't have mattered.'

The woman also accused Goodes of being too sensitive when it comes to abuse he receives, and said he needs to 'man up and just take it if he wants to play the game'.

The comments come after Sydney announced Goodes would miss at least this Saturday's game with the Adelaide Crows, in a statement released on Wednesday evening.

Swans CEO Andrew Ireland said the decision to grant the premiership champion a leave of absence from the club was made due to the damage the scandal is doing to his mental well-being.

'Adam is sick and tired of this behaviour. It has been happening for too long and it has taken its toll,' Mr Ireland said. 'As a club we are working with Adam and those close to him and supporting him through what is a really difficult time. 'We will give Adam all the time he needs. We will keep supporting him and he will return to the Club whenever he is ready.'

The announcement comes after the debate over fans heckling of the Indigenous star was reignited last weekend following a tribute paid to the star during Sydney's clash with West Coast.

After kicking a goal, Lewis Jetta - another of Sydney's Indigenous players - performed a tribal dance, which he later dedicated to his friend and mentor. The dance included a spear-throwing action, which was directed by Jetta at fans who had booed Goodes throughout the match. Goodes performed a similar dance during a game in June during the AFL's Indigenous round.

On Tuesday, the Swans slammed fans who boo Goodes as 'racist'. 'Should anyone choose to deride Adam through booing, then they are part of something that is inherently racist and totally unacceptable,' Mr Ireland said. 'The people involved in this behaviour can justify it any way they like. Our Club calls it racism.

'Adam is sick of it. He is tired and drained by it. It is something that has weighed down on him for some time. 'He is frustrated that he is constantly the face of such negativity.'

The club's statement came amid reports Goodes was on the verge of walking away from the sport entirely as a result of the abuse he has endured.

The AFL Players Association released a statement on Tuesday, calling for an immediate end to the attacks on Goodes.

We believe that Adam has been vilified for calling out racism, for expressing his views on Aboriginal issues, and for celebrating and promoting his proud cultural background. This is not something for which Adam should be vilified – it is something for which he should be celebrated.'

The race row around Goodes dates back to May 2013, when he pointed out a person in the crowd during a game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for calling him an ape. The supporter was removed from the ground.

The person who made the comment turned out to be a 13-year-old girl, who Goodes later spoke with to discuss how her comments hurt him because of his Aboriginal background.

Critics of Goodes said he called out a minor who was too immature to take responsibility for the comments, and suggest fans boo him because they dislike his on-field behaviour and not because of his race.

Goodes has played 365 games for Sydney since debuting in 1999, and has twice won the Brownlow Medal - the award given to the league's best player. He was also named Australian of the Year in 2014. [So was the crooked Tim Flannery]

I have been pointing out for many years that there seems to be a syndrome of general biological fitness -- such that high IQ people are healthier, live longer and have better emotional balance. High IQ, in other words, is just one part of general bodily good functioning. The recent study below is another indicator of such an association and goes on to show that the link is genetic. Some people are just born healthier and fitter. If so, all your bits work well -- including your brain, which is just another bodily organ. A wise man from long ago knew that. He said: "For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath." (Mark 4: 25). "All men are equal" exists neither in the Bible nor in life

The association between intelligence and lifespan is mostly genetic

By Rosalind Arden et al.

Abstract

Background: Several studies in the new field of cognitive epidemiology have shown that higher intelligence predicts longer lifespan. This positive correlation might arise from socioeconomic status influencing both intelligence and health; intelligence leading to better health behaviours; and/or some shared genetic factors influencing both intelligence and health. Distinguishing among these hypotheses is crucial for medicine and public health, but can only be accomplished by studying a genetically informative sample.

Methods: We analysed data from three genetically informative samples containing information on intelligence and mortality: Sample 1, 377 pairs of male veterans from the NAS-NRC US World War II Twin Registry; Sample 2, 246 pairs of twins from the Swedish Twin Registry; and Sample 3, 784 pairs of twins from the Danish Twin Registry. The age at which intelligence was measured differed between the samples. We used three methods of genetic analysis to examine the relationship between intelligence and lifespan: we calculated the proportion of the more intelligent twins who outlived their co-twin; we regressed within-twin-pair lifespan differences on within-twin-pair intelligence differences; and we used the resulting regression coefficients to model the additive genetic covariance. We conducted a meta-analysis of the regression coefficients across the three samples.

Results: The combined (and all three individual samples) showed a small positive phenotypic correlation between intelligence and lifespan. In the combined sample observed r = .12 (95% confidence interval .06 to .18). The additive genetic covariance model supported a genetic relationship between intelligence and lifespan. In the combined sample the genetic contribution to the covariance was 95%; in the US study, 84%; in the Swedish study, 86%, and in the Danish study, 85%.

Conclusions: The finding of common genetic effects between lifespan and intelligence has important implications for public health, and for those interested in the genetics of intelligence, lifespan or inequalities in health outcomes including lifespan.

Gerard Henderson has some well-informed comments below. I had some involvement with the DLP back in the '60s so was well aware of Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria. I certainly watched his TV broadcasts. But I am surprised that Henderson fails to mention that Santamaria was a devout Catholic under considerable influence from Melbourne's redoubtable and long-serving Archbishop Daniel Mannix.

His anti-Communism was heroic at a time when the CPA was still influental in the unions and he was undoubtedly instrumental in defeating the Communist unionists. But on the other hand he often quoted the bumbling economic thinking of Leftist intellectuals like Felix Rohatyn.

I concluded that it was only the atheism of the Soviets that drove Santamaria. He was a Catholic first and last and that was all. If the Soviets had been tolerant of religion, I think it is pretty clear that he would have been a cheerful democratic Leftist. The 1891 encyclical "De rerum novarum" was after all fairly sympathetic to Leftism as long as it was not Communist.

So Santamaria was in fact consistent -- a consistent "De rerum novarum" Catholic. He was certainly influential but he was no conservative. One should remember that Catholics were overwhelmingly Labor Party supporters in those days. The ALP was "their" party.

Menzies was the first to disrupt that attachment by giving Federal financial assistance to Catholic schools, something that still continues and is now something of a "third rail" in Australian politics -- as ALP leader Mark Latham found out

B­A Santamaria did not encourage conservative Catholics to join the Liberal Party. At the time of his death, the two Liberal MPs who were most in agreement with Bob Santamaria’s philosophy were Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews.

In 1994, Abbott asked Santamaria for a reference for use in his preselection for the Sydney seat of Warringah. During an interview on May 8 2000, Abbott recalled the occasion: “I asked Santa for a reference for my preselection. And Santa said to me: ‘I don’t think it will do you any good’. And I said to him: ‘Well, let me be the judge of that’. He said: ‘Well, let me think about it and come back to you’. And he came back to me about 24 hours later and said: ‘Look, Tony, I just don’t think I can do it’. And I said: ‘How come?’ And he said: ‘I just don’t think at my time in life I really should be writing references for people in Liberal Party pre­selections’.”

“And then, of course, I won the preselection. And I think there was a slight sense of disappointment that I had disproven his deep conviction that someone who was very publicly a Catholic — as opposed to simply, quietly and unobtrusively a Catholic — could get anywhere inside the Liberal Party. I think he always regarded me as a bit of a jarring figure in his intellectual and social landscape because I was a public Catholic and still it didn’t appear to be stopping me from going places inside the Liberal Party.”

Andrews had a not dissimilar experience. Unlike Abbott, he had not been involved with Santamaria’s National Civic Council, which commenced in the late 1930s-early 1940s as an organisation called the Movement.

Andrews first met Santamaria when, as a residential student at Newman College at Melbourne University, he and a group of friends decided to establish an Archbishop Daniel Mannix Lecture — and asked Santamaria to deliver the inaugural oration in October 1977.

Over the next decade or so, Andrews met Santamaria on about 10 occasions. There were also irregular telephone conversations.

Andrews was not a long-term Liberal Party member before contesting the Melbourne seat of Menzies. Before deciding to enter the preselection ballot, he visited Santamaria at his office. Andrews recalled that the NCC president was not at all encouraging and seemed to exhibit a negative attitude to party politics in general — and to the Liberal Party in particular. Andrews commented that if Santamaria were intent on influencing Liberal MPs, he would have expected to receive invitations to NCC board lunches — along with regular telephone calls — once he became a parliamentarian. This did not happen.

On the Saturday after his death, The Weekend Australian reported that Santamaria had grown so disillusioned with the Liberals after they lost in 1993 that he spent much of the remainder of the year trying to organise a new pro-­family and anti-economic reform political party.

The Santamaria family placed a 40-year embargo on the Santamaria Papers when they were given to the State Library of Victoria in 2006. However, Patrick Morgan (see facing page) was given an exemption to this embargo when preparing his two-­volume edited collection of Santamaria’s letters and documents, Your Most Obedient Servant and Running the Show, published by Melbourne Uni­versity Press in 2007 and 2008.

Morgan’s research indicates that in late 1992, Santamaria formed a group comprising Malcolm Fraser and academics Robert Manne and John Carroll. The aim was to establish a new political grouping, which was protectionist and interventionist, to be headed by Fraser. This is confirmed in Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, which Fraser co-authored with Margaret Simons.

At the time, Fraser had been out of office for almost a decade and neither Manne nor Carroll had any experience in mainstream politics. This initiative suffered the same fate as all of Santamaria’s ­attempts to establish a third party to take on the Liberal and Labor parties in the 1980s and 1990s — that is, failure.

Santamaria was fond of quoting the saying that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intelligentsia”.

In 2012 and 2013, David Marr wrote biographical monographs on Tony Abbott and Cardinal George Pell respectively. Both are tinged with the anti-Catholic sectarianism of a born-again atheist and are long on secular sneering, in the Marr way.

Marr attempts to make much of the alleged Santamaria-Pell-Abbott axis. But his case is always overstated and frequently confused — particularly with respect to the Democratic Labor Party which, with the support of Santamaria, broke away from the Australian Labor Party at the Labor split in the mid-1950s.

In The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell, Marr wrote, with ­reference to Santamaria’s state ­funeral: “Pell’s oldest political loyalties were to the DLP, but when the party collapsed Santamaria had directed his followers to cross the bridge to the Liberals. It was not altogether comfortable for either party, so it mattered a great deal for Santamaria’s people when (John) Howard reconciled with the old man at the very end.”

The fact is that when the DLP collapsed in the second half of the 1970s, Santamaria did not direct his followers to “cross the bridge” to the Liberal Party. If this had been the case, then Abbott — as a follower of Santamaria in the late 1970s and the early 1980s — might have joined the Liberal Party at that time. He didn’t.

In 2012, the Melbourne-based researcher Geoffrey Browne was given access to correspondence that passed between Santamaria and Abbott in the late 1980s. It seems that the State Library of Victoria made an error with respect to the 40-year embargo that applies to this vast collection. Browne passed the material to the historians Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, who reported the exchange in The Weekend Australian on October 13-14, 2012.

Marr read only the newspaper report; I have been able to obtain a copy of the entire correspondence. According to Marr, Santamaria gave Abbott his political bearings. But Santamaria merely advised Abbott not to flirt with the NSW Labor Party, which was dominated by the ALP’s right wing in the state. Santamaria restated his decades-long hostility to the NSW Labor Right. In spite of this, he provided no encouragement for Abbott to join the Liberal Party.

The correspondence went as follows: In April 1987, at a meeting, Santamaria offered Abbott a job in Melbourne working for the Council for the National Interest. The CNI was one of the many front organisations created by Santamaria. Its focus was defence and foreign policy, but its creation was part of his plan to construct a new political party.

At the time, Abbott had just quit as a Catholic seminarian (a trainee priest). He told Santamaria in a letter dated April 21, 1987 that he needed to build a career and was inclined to accept a job offer to become a journalist working for The Bulletin. He politely rejected Santamaria’s proposal.

On December 8, 1987, Abbott again wrote to Santamaria — shortly after returning from the NCC’s national conference. In a thoughtful, but blunt letter, Abbott told Santamaria that his current political strategy was not working.

Abbott wrote: “To change society one must work in it, share the priorities and fears, cares and concerns of the ‘common herd’, make the compromises that life requires, be wrong, get blood on one’s hands — but at least, be in it. Are we? In 1954, the Movement dominated a major party [the ALP]. In 1969, the Movement had some significant parliamentary influence [through the DLP]. In 1980, the Movement controlled four big unions. Today, we run the AFA [Australian Family Association] and are the main force behind an as yet embryonic lobby group, the CNI. The CNI and AFA are worthy works. But they are essentially waiting in the wings of politics on the off-chance that someone might ask them to dance.”

Interpreting the Abbott-Santamaria letters during an appearance on the ABC’s program The Drum on March 23, 2013, Marr claimed that Santamaria said the following to Abbott: “No [not the Labor Party] — the Liberal Party. Yes, there are many, many risible and ridiculous things about the Liberal Party. But it’s the Liberal Party, now, Tony.”

This is a complete invention — as Abbott’s contemporary writings make clear. Soon after their correspondence, Abbott wrote a profile on Santamaria for The Weekend Australian, which was published on December 30-31, 1989 to mark the collapse of Soviet communism.

It was a broadly sympathetic assessment, but some critical points were made. Abbott commented that “the difference between Santamaria and more mainstream economic commentators is that Santamaria has predicted 30 (rather than just 20) of the last five crises”. Clearly, Abbott understood Santamaria’s crisis mentality.

During the interview on which the profile was based, Santamaria restated the position that he had never stood for political office because he did not think he would be very good at politics owing to “an inability to compromise”. Abbott asks the following question about Santamaria: “Has he not entered the political fray without ever putting his ideas to the electoral test; has he not asked lesser men to undertake the task he would not do himself?”

It is a significant query — which reflects Abbott’s commitment to mainstream politics and explains why he had rejected Santamaria’s offer to devote himself fulltime to the Movement in its final manifestation as the NCC.

How, then, to explain the relationship between Abbott and Santamaria? To a Catholic, anti-communist political activist on a university campus in the 1960s and 1970s, Santamaria had considerable appeal. He was a charismatic speaker and a first-class TV performer on his weekly program, Point of View. He was also a compelling writer.

As a person born in September 1945, I found Santamaria compelling when I first met him in early 1965. So did Abbott, who was born in November 1957 and first met Santamaria around 1978. So did many anti-communist Catholic men and women of our generation. It’s just that the closer you got to Santamaria, the more likely you were to disagree with him over tactics.

I made a public critique of the Movement at the NCC’s national convention in October 1974, when I was 29. Abbott made a not dissimilar critique in his private letter of December 8, 1987, aged 30. By this time, in both cases it seems, Santamaria’s charisma had faded and the flaws in his way of operating had become more evident.

David Marr’s assessment of Santamaria’s influence on Abbott is facile. In the second edition of Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott, Marr writes: “Santamaria’s instinct was always to block Labor. Starving it of the talent of young Tony was a tiny detail in a lifetime of hostility. Abbott was not immediately persuaded to ditch his fundamental allegiance — he voted Labor in that [NSW 1988] state election — but the man he called his ‘philosophical star’ had given him his bearings.”

This theory that a strong-willed person like Abbott — possessed of the drive that makes it possible for someone to become prime minister — had to be given “bearings” by Santamaria is ridiculous. As Michael Duffy makes clear in his book Latham and Abbott, Abbott drifted towards the Liberal Party around 1989 — a party that Santamaria then regarded as “reptilian” in nature. Clearly, Abbott found his own bearings.

Abbott has been surprisingly open about this relationship with Santamaria — despite the fact that he had little to gain from stating his long-ago contacts with the one-time Catholic political operator. Addressing the H R Nicholls Society in March 2001, Abbott described Santamaria as his “first political mentor”.

Abbott elaborated on this in a December 2003 interview with Paul Kelly in The Weekend Australian Magazine: “All the way through student politics at university, I was closely involved with the National Civic Council. I regarded him [Santamaria] as an important presence in my life and an important source of ideas, inspiration, example. To this day, I regard Santa as my earliest political mentor, and with the possible exception of the PM [John Howard], as my greatest mentor.”

In launching the first volume of Patrick Morgan’s edited collection of Santamaria’s papers at the State Library of Victoria in January 2007, Abbott referred to his correspondence with Santamaria in the late 1980s.

He maintained that Santa­maria’s enduring political legacy could be located in the Howard government’s foreign policy and social conservatism. According to Abbott, this showed “that the tide of secular humanism was not as ­irreversible as he [Santamaria] thought”.

Abbott concluded that, “the DLP is alive and well and living inside the Howard government, and Labor’s SDA caucus has a leader who should at least give them a fair hearing. The times may not have suited his [Santamaria’s] more dire predictions but they have been kinder to his values.”

The latter reference was to the backing achieved by Labor’s new leader Kevin Rudd, who received strong support in the caucus from Labor MPs aligned to the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association — the SDA, or “Shoppies”, led by one-time Santamaria associate Joe de Bruyn.

Rudd’s mother, Margaret, was a DLP supporter in the aftermath of the Labor split. Abbott’s line was that Santamaria’s influence lived on not only in the DLP but even, to a lesser extent, in the ALP.

That was Abbott’s generous assessment at a function attended by Santamaria’s extended family. It glossed over the reality that Santamaria never really liked the Liberal Party in general — or the Howard government in particular.

When the second edition of Patrick Morgan’s collection was launched in 2008, it was revealed that in March 1996 — just two years before Santamaria’s death — Santamaria went back to where he had commenced with the Movement some six decades previously. He suggested to the NCC national executive in early 1996 that what was left of the Movement “should begin a new fight for the ‘soul’ of the Labor Party”.

So, in 1996, Santamaria was so disillusioned with the Liberals that he wanted his remaining forces to try their luck in the ALP. By then, however, Santamaria had conceded that his long-time wish to “establish a new political party … was beyond us”. Not before time.

EVERYTHING seems to be bad for you if you read enough in the health literature, but milk would seem pretty safe. "New Scientist" has however just done a big article pointing out various doubts about milk. They don't however have much in the way of actual scientific evidence against milk. The one academic journal article they cite is below:

Milk intake and risk of mortality and fractures in women and men: cohort studies

Abstract

Objective: To examine whether high milk consumption is associated with mortality and fractures in women and men.

Participants: Two large Swedish cohorts, one with 61 433 women (39-74 years at baseline 1987-90) and one with 45 339 men (45-79 years at baseline 1997), were administered food frequency questionnaires. The women responded to a second food frequency questionnaire in 1997.

Main outcome measure: Multivariable survival models were applied to determine the association between milk consumption and time to mortality or fracture.

Results: During a mean follow-up of 20.1 years, 15 541 women died and 17 252 had a fracture, of whom 4259 had a hip fracture. In the male cohort with a mean follow-up of 11.2 years, 10 112 men died and 5066 had a fracture, with 1166 hip fracture cases. In women the adjusted mortality hazard ratio for three or more glasses of milk a day compared with less than one glass a day was 1.93 (95% confidence interval 1.80 to 2.06). For every glass of milk, the adjusted hazard ratio of all cause mortality was 1.15 (1.13 to 1.17) in women and 1.03 (1.01 to 1.04) in men. For every glass of milk in women no reduction was observed in fracture risk with higher milk consumption for any fracture (1.02, 1.00 to 1.04) or for hip fracture (1.09, 1.05 to 1.13). The corresponding adjusted hazard ratios in men were 1.01 (0.99 to 1.03) and 1.03 (0.99 to 1.07). In subsamples of two additional cohorts, one in males and one in females, a positive association was seen between milk intake and both urine 8-iso-PGF2α (a biomarker of oxidative stress) and serum interleukin 6 (a main inflammatory biomarker).

Conclusions: High milk intake was associated with higher mortality in one cohort of women and in another cohort of men, and with higher fracture incidence in women. Given the observational study designs with the inherent possibility of residual confounding and reverse causation phenomena, a cautious interpretation of the results is recommended.

This is very weak evidence of anything, as the authors admit in their final sentence. Let me spell it out: The milk-consumption data is from a self-report questionnaire rather than any actual observations or measurements -- and such data is notoriously subject to social desirability influences, among other distortions.

There are two possibilities: 1). Sickly people drink a lot of milk in the belief that it is good for them; 2). Sickly people SAY they drink a lot of milk in the belief that they SHOULD do that. Either way the sickliness probably came first, not the milk drinking. So sickliness caused milk drinking rather than milk drinking caused sickliness. It could go either way and we do not know which way. The study, in other words, did not advance our knowledge of the matter at all. There is still no reason to think that milk is bad for you.

Avoiding that pesky evolutionary thinkingThe Left are deeply uncomfortable with evolutionary thinking. It explains too much for their liking. That men and women have evolved to have inborn differences that reflect their role vis a vis children flies in the face their feminist creed that there are no differences between men and women -- for instance.
So the blindness to evolution that we see below is no accident. "New Scientist" has always been Left-leaning and their fervour for global warming shows that to be still undimmed. The claim that the high mortality rate seen during the Black Death in the 14th century may have been the result of poor general health rather than the strength of the bacterium is plausible at first sight but neglects the obvious. And the plausibilty fades fast when you look at ALL the evidence -- something Leftists chronically avoid. See the last sentence in the article below.
So what is the obvious factor that the writer below is blind to? That those who were infected in subsequent plagues were almost all the descendants of those who did not die the first time around. Those who did not die the first time around had some factor or factors in their makeup that made them resistant to yersinia pestis -- and it is they who survived to reproduce and pass on their resistance. Pure natural selection at work. Fewer people died the second and third times around because they had inherited resistance. They survived because they were the descendants of survivors. Obvious to anyone but a Leftist. Leftist thinking rots your brain
The secret of plague’s death toll is out. The high mortality rate seen during the Black Death in the 14th century may have been the result of poor general health rather than the strength of the bacterium.
The Black Death killed about 60 per cent of Europe’s population. That’s surprising as recent plague outbreaks weren’t as devastating.
“There is a huge difference in mortality rates,” says Sharon DeWitte at the University of South Carolina, even though 14th century and 20th century plagues were caused by the same bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and its genetics were similar in both outbreaks.
DeWitte believes that the high mortality rate in the 14th century may have been the result of a general decline in health. She examined skeletons in London cemeteries from the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries and found that more adults under the age of 35 were buried in the 13th century.
This suggests that people were dying younger before the Black Death arrived – probably because of famine and an increase in disease burden from other pathogens.
“Together with historical data, the picture that emerges is that the population was not doing well,” says DeWitte.
But Samuel Cohn, a historian from the University of Glasgow, UK, is not convinced.
“The wealthy were also dying in great numbers during the first outbreak of the Black Death [1347-51],” he says, noting that it is unlikely that they were in poor health.
SOURCE

If we compare him with Fascists of the past, his ideas are clearly Fascist. Fortunately, however, he has none of their power. "But how can such a nice guy be a Fascist?" one might ask. In answer to that remember that "Pope" is a version of the Italian word for "father" and that both Mussolini and Hitler were seen as fatherly figures in their times. Hitler had most Germans convinced that he loved them. And even in the mouth of a holy man bad ideas can be destructive when other people take them seriously.

And the church has always accomodated Fascism. In 1929 Mussolini and Pope Pius 12th signed the Lateran treaty -- which is the legal basis for the existence of the Vatican State to this day -- and Pius in fact at one stage called Mussolini "the man sent by Providence". The treaty recognized Roman Catholicism as the Italian State religion as well as recognizing the Vatican as a sovereign state. What Mussolini got in exchange was acceptance by the church -- something that was enormously important in the Italy of that time.

It should also be noted that Mussolini's economic system (his "corporate State") was a version of syndicalism -- having workers, bosses and the party allegedly united in several big happy families -- and syndicalism is precisely what had been recommended in the then recent (1891) "radical" encyclical De rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII. So that helped enormously to reconcile Mussolini to the church. Economically, Fascism was more Papal than capitalist (though in the Papal version of syndicalism the church naturally had a bigger role).

Syndicalism was of course a far-Leftist idea (with Sorel as a major prophet) long before it was a Papal one but the Holy Father presented a much more humanized and practical version of it and thus seems in the end to have been more influential than his Leftist rivals. Mussolini was of course acutely aware of both streams of syndicalist thinking and it was a great convenience to him to be able to present himself as both a modern Leftist and as a supporter of the church.

So that is the Catholic intellectual inheritance, making Frank's ideas not at all outlandish in a Catholic context. Catholic economic ideas in fact formed the basis of Italian Fascism. And Frank has built on that foundation using more modern ideas.In his recent encyclical, Frank has made it clear that he idealizes a simple and definitely non-capitalist rural past. Hitler did the same and the modern-day Green/Left do the same. So exactly from where did Frank get those ideas? As well as from Catholic economic thinking, he got them from liberation theology. Liberation theology is a very Leftist doctrine that is widespread among South American priests and Frank is a South American priest. So where did South American priests get their ideas? From the prevailing South American culture. And South American thinking is typically Fascist. Latin America has had heaps of Fascist-type dictatorships in the recent history of its governance so that is hardly controversial. Fascism explains Latin-American poverty. Fascism is a form of Leftism and Leftism is always economically destructive.

So where did South American Fascism come from? Initially from Simon Bolivar, the great liberator of South America. Bolivar wanted to replace the king of Spain by a South American elite, not by mass democracy. And to this day the Venezuelan regime describes itself as Bolivarian. Bolivar and his ideas are far from forgotten. Bolivar emphasized the importance of a strong ruler and the constitution he wrote aimed to establish a lifelong presidency and an hereditary senate. He explicitly rejected the liberal ideas of the U.S. founders. Fascist enough? Memories of a certain Tausend Jahr Reich come to mind. So the Latin American dictators have simply been good Bolivarians.

So that is the mental world that formed Pope Frank as he was growing up in Argentina. And who is to this day the most influential political figure in Argentina? Juan Peron, another Fascist and a friend of Mussolini in his day. And it was of course Peron who gave refuge to many displaced Nazis after WWII. And what was Peron's appeal? He claimed to be standing up for the descamisados", the "shirtless ones". In typical Leftist style he claimed to be an advocate for the poor.

Is Frank's thinking coming into focus yet? He is actually a pretty good Peronist. He has brought Argentinian Fascism to the Holy See. He is certainly no original thinker. Paul Driessen sets out below how his prescriptions would perpetuate poverty, disease, and premature death in the Third World -- just as they have done in Argentina

The Laudato Si encyclical on climate, sustainability and the environment prepared by and for Pope Francis is often eloquent, always passionate but often encumbered by platitudes, many of them erroneous.

“Man has slapped nature in the face,” and “nature never forgives,” the pontiff declares. “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as in the last 200 years.” It isn’t possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society. “Each year thousands of species are being lost,” and “if we destroy creation, it will destroy us.”

The pope believes climate change is largely manmade and driven by a capitalist economic system that exploits the poor. Therefore, he says, we must radically reform the global economy, promote sustainable development and wealth redistribution, and ensure “intergenerational solidarity” with the poor, who must be given their “sacred rights” to labor, lodging and land (the Three L’s).

All of this suggests that, for the most part, Pope Francis probably welcomes statements by his new friends in the United Nations and its climate and sustainability alliance.

One top Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official bluntly says climate policy is no longer about environmental protection; instead, the next climate summit will negotiate “the distribution of the world’s resources.” UN climate chief Christiana Figueres goes even further. UN bureaucrats, she says, are undertaking “probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the global economic development model.” [emphasis added]

However, statements by other prominent prophets of planetary demise hopefully give the pope pause.

Obama science advisor John Holdren and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, in their Human Ecology book: “We need to de-develop the United States” and other developed countries, “to bring our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.” We will then address the “ecologically feasible development of the underdeveloped countries.” [emphasis added]

Ehrlich again: “Giving society cheap energy is like giving an idiot child a machine gun.” And most outrageous: The “instant death control” provided by DDT was “responsible for the drastic lowering of death rates” in poor countries; so they need to have a “death rate solution” imposed on them.

Radical environmentalism’s death campaigns do not stop with opposing DDT even as a powerful insect repellant to prevent malaria. They view humans (other than themselves) as consumers, polluters and “a plague upon the Earth” – never as creators, innovators or protectors. They oppose modern fertilizers and biotech foods that feed more people from less land, using less water. And of course they are viscerally against all forms and uses of hydrocarbon energy, which yields far more energy per acre than alternatives.

Reflect on all of this a moment. Unelected, unaccountable UN bureaucrats have given themselves the authority to upend the world economic order and redistribute its wealth and resources – with no evidence that any alternative they might have in mind will bring anything but worse poverty, inequality and death.

Moreover, beyond the dishonest, arrogant and callous attitudes reflected in these outrageous statements, there are countless basic realities that the encyclical and alarmist allies sweep under the rug.

We are trying today to feed, clothe, and provide electricity, jobs, homes, and better health and living standards to six billion more people than lived on our planet 200 years ago. Back then, reliance on human and animal muscle, wood and dung fires, windmills and water wheels, and primitive, backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk farming methods made life nasty, brutish and short for the vast majority of humans.

As a fascinating short video by Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling illustrates, human life expectancy and societal wealth has surged dramatically over these past 200 years. None of this would have been possible without the capitalism, scientific method and hydrocarbon energy that radical, shortsighted activists in the UN, EPA, Big Green, Inc. and Vatican now want to put in history’s dustbin.

Over the past three decades, fossil fuels – mostly coal – helped 1.3 billion people get electricity and escape debilitating, often lethal energy and economic poverty. However, 1.3 billion still do not have electricity. In India alone, more people than live in the USA still lack electricity; in Sub-Saharan Africa, 730 million (equal to Europe) still cook and heat with wood, charcoal and animal dung.

Hundreds of millions get horribly sick and 4-6 million die every year from lung and intestinal diseases, due to breathing smoke from open fires and not having clean water, refrigeration and unspoiled food.

Providing energy, food, homes and the Three L’s to middle class and impoverished families cannot happen without nuclear and hydrocarbon energy and numerous raw materials. Thankfully, we still have these resources in abundance, because “our ultimate resource” (our creative intellect) has enabled us to use “fracking” and other technologies to put Earth’s resources to productive use serving humanity.

Little solar panels on huts, subsistence and organic farming, and bird-and-bat-butchering wind turbines have serious cost, reliability and sustainability problems of their own. If Pope Francis truly wants to help the poor, he cannot rely on these “alternatives” or on UN and Big Green ruling elite wannabes. Who are they to decide what is “ecologically feasible,” what living standards people will be “permitted” to enjoy, or how the world should “more fairly” share greater scarcity, poverty and energy deprivation?

We are all obligated to help protect our planet and its people – from real problems, not imaginary ones. Outside the computer modelers’ windows, in The Real World, we are not running out of energy and raw materials. (We’re just not allowed to develop and use them.) The only species going extinct have been birds on islands where humans introduced new predators – and raptors that have been wiped out by giant wind turbines across habitats in California and other locations. Nor are we encountering climate chaos.

No category 3-5 hurricane has struck the USA in a record 9-3/4 years. (Is that blessing due to CO2 and capitalism?) There has been no warming in 19 years, because the sun has gone quiet again. We have not been battered by droughts more frequent or extreme than what humanity experienced many times over the millennia, including those that afflicted biblical Egypt, the Mayas and Anasazi, and Dust Bowl America.

The scientific method brought centuries of planetary and human progress. It requires that we propose and test hypotheses that explain how nature works. If experimental evidence supports a hypothesis, we have a new rule that can guide further health and scientific advances. If the evidence contradicts the hypothesis, we must devise a new premise – or give up on further progress.

But with climate change, a politicized method has gained supremacy. Based on ideology, it ignores real-world evidence and fiercely defends its assumptions and proclamations. Laudato Si places the Catholic Church at risk of surrendering its role as a champion of science and human progress, and returning to the ignominious persecution of Galileo.

Nor does resort to sustainable development provide guidance. Sustainability is largely interchangeable with “dangerous manmade climate change” as a rallying cry for anti-hydrocarbon, wealth redistribution and economic transformation policies. It means whatever particular interests want it to mean and has become yet one more intolerant ideology in college and government circles.

Climate change and sustainability are critical moral issues. Denying people access to abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy is not just wrong. It is immoral – and lethal.

It is an unconscionable crime against humanity to implement policies that pretend to protect the world’s energy-deprived masses from hypothetical manmade climate and other dangers decades from now – by perpetuating poverty, malnutrition and disease that kill millions of them tomorrow.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine

We sort of knew that already. The correlation between low IQ and poverty is well-attested. The latest journal article below however takes the story a bit further in that it identifies which brain regions are responsible. Certain areas of poor people's brains are actually shrunken! The authors seem to have frightened themselves by their boldness, however, as they have tacked a totally illogical conclusion on to their findings. If poverty is a result of the shrunken brain you were born with, does it not follow that there is not much you can do about it? The authors below avoid that conclusion. Instead they say that poor households "should be targeted for additional resources aimed at remediating early childhood environments". An hereditary problem can be fixed by changing the environment? That's a pretty good Non Sequitur as far as I can see. It's not totally daft in that genetics accounts for only about two thirds of IQ. There are some other influences that have an effect. But all the research shows that family environment is NOT part of those other influences on IQ. It's jarring but that is what all the twin studies show. So the hairy lady and her colleagues below are just ignoring the evidence. But they need to in order to sound nicely Leftist about it all.Footnote: The authors of course avoid the term "IQ" like the plague but the standardized tests of academic achievement they used are little more than IQ tests and correlate highly with acknowledged measures of IQ. So their findings show that IQ, income and brain development all cluster together.

Importance: Children living in poverty generally perform poorly in school, with markedly lower standardized test scores and lower educational attainment. The longer children live in poverty, the greater their academic deficits. These patterns persist to adulthood, contributing to lifetime-reduced occupational attainment.

Objective: To determine whether atypical patterns of structural brain development mediate the relationship between household poverty and impaired academic performance.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Longitudinal cohort study analyzing 823 magnetic resonance imaging scans of 389 typically developing children and adolescents aged 4 to 22 years from the National Institutes of Health Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Normal Brain Development with complete sociodemographic and neuroimaging data. Data collection began in November 2001 and ended in August 2007. Participants were screened for a variety of factors suspected to adversely affect brain development, recruited at 6 data collection sites across the United States, assessed at baseline, and followed up at 24-month intervals for a total of 3 periods. Each study center used community-based sampling to reflect regional and overall US demographics of income, race, and ethnicity based on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development definitions of area income. One-quarter of sample households reported the total family income below 200% of the federal poverty level. Repeated observations were available for 301 participants.

Exposure Household poverty measured by family income and adjusted for family size as a percentage of the federal poverty level.

Main Outcomes and Measures: Children’s scores on cognitive and academic achievement assessments and brain tissue, including gray matter of the total brain, frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and hippocampus.

Results: Poverty is tied to structural differences in several areas of the brain associated with school readiness skills, with the largest influence observed among children from the poorest households. Regional gray matter volumes of children below 1.5 times the federal poverty level were 3 to 4 percentage points below the developmental norm (P less than .05). A larger gap of 8 to 10 percentage points was observed for children below the federal poverty level (P less than .05). These developmental differences had consequences for children's academic achievement. On average, children from low-income households scored 4 to 7 points lower on standardized tests (P less than .05). As much as 20% of the gap in test scores could be explained by maturational lags in the frontal and temporal lobes.

Conclusions and Relevance: The influence of poverty on children’s learning and achievement is mediated by structural brain development. To avoid long-term costs of impaired academic functioning, households below 150% of the federal poverty level should be targeted for additional resources aimed at remediating early childhood environments.

The stockbroker below is an economic moron. Negative gearing is normal accounting. It means that the cost of earning income is deducted before you are taxed on that income. Any other system would be hugely destructive, It would mean taxing people on money that they do not have. There is no "subsidy" involved, just normal cost accounting.

And we read below: "“If someone borrows money to buy residential property, it doesn’t create any jobs,” he said." How does he think residential property gets built? By fairies? The housing industry is in fact a major employer.

The guy is a vivid testimony to the sad state of modern education. He might make a good hewer of wood and drawer of water but he is a disgrace to his present occupation. A very low-wattage brain indeed

AUSTRALIA spends 20 times more money on subsidising negatively geared property than funding start-up businesses and this could cost us jobs and our economic future, one senior financial analyst says.

Ivor Ries, a Morgan’s stockbroking firm analyst, said one of the greatest weaknesses in the Australian economy was the lack of investment in infrastructure and early stage businesses.

“We are miles behind places like the US in financing young, growth businesses. We’re pathetic really compared with the US,” he told the ABC this week.

He said about $250 million was available in venture capital for young entrepreneurs each year. This was about 20 times less than what taxpayers spent subsidising investment properties, which do not create jobs.

“We currently give $4 billion a year to investors via the tax system to subsidise people buying negatively geared rental accommodation,” he told news.com.au.

Mr Ries said Australia was basically a country that subsidised nonproductive capital. “If someone borrows money to buy residential property, it doesn’t create any jobs,” he said.

“We’re giving already well-off people subsidies to buy more property, whereas the country in total spends $250 million a year on venture capital. There’s something wrong with that balance.”

It also meant that Australia was basically “exporting jobs”.

“It just means there will be less jobs here in the longer term. We’re just exporting jobs at the moment,” he said.

The money spent on venture capital was even less than the $1 billion Australians spent buying luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs) every year. A high proportion of these vehicles will be used as private cars but written off as a business asset, which the taxpayer pays for.

“The reality of life in Australia today is we subsidise people buying high-end SUVs but we don’t give as much to venture capital,” Mr Ries said.

Mr Ries said the tax system should be tilted back towards things that actually created wealth and jobs. He saw at least two businesses a week that had developed some fantastic technology but could not get funding.

“I’ll give them a list of 25 venture capital funds in Australia and I will say to them, ‘Don’t expect to get any money out of them because they are fully committed’ and I think any small business that’s got great new technology, or a great new business idea in Australia at the moment is probably getting that advice from multiple sources around the country,” he told the ABC.

“We just don’t have the capacity to fund these businesses at the moment.”

If Australians did start investing in venture capital at the same rate the US did, spending would jump from $250 million to $4.9 billion a year.

The risk of not doing this could condemn the country to low employment growth and a sticky unemployment rate, which is hovering about 6 per cent.

He said more tax concessions should be made available. “I think the government needs to make it much more attractive to invest in these things which, by their nature, are much more risky,” he told news.com.au. “Nine out of 10 of them will fail but the one that succeeds will often be hugely successful.”

I guess lots of people have heard old fogies like me complaining that education "ain't what it used to be". And of course it is not. The world of today is different from the past and education must reflect that to some extent.

A century ago, a "Greekless" person was regarded as not fully educated, for instance. Even if you were not fluent in ancient Greek, you were expected to know the more famous quotations and be able to at least figure out the bits that you did not know. These days a knowledge of html is much more important and helpful. It certainly makes blogging easier.

But good stuff has undoubtedly been lost in today's schools and replaced with blah. Important areas of cultural awareness have been supplanted by lessons about fluid sexual identities and the importance of saving the planet! Not to mention the evils of patriarchy and lies about Hitler being a conservative.

And it takes us old guys to be aware of that. If you have never been exposed to something you cannot know what you have missed. And to have missed exposure to our great cultural heritage is a great loss indeed. There is, of course, culture of all sorts. But what I am talking about is areas of enjoyment that have stood the test of time. And poetry, literature and music are such areas.

Contrary to what Leftists seem to believe, the world did not begin yesterday. It's possible that half of all the great minds that have ever existed are alive today -- but what about the other half? And the traditional role of education was to tell us about that other half

And it is particularly in the area of culture that the other half is important. Scientists, engineers and philosophers of the past have now mostly been completely superseded. Isaac Newton, for instance, was brilliant in his day but physics has long gone beyond him in its understanding of the universe. But cultural contributions are really never superseded. Monteverdi might have written the Vespro della Beata Vergine 400 years ago but it is still performed and enjoyed to this day. And, for religious music, no-one has surpassed J.S. Bach, who lived from 1685 to 1750.

And its the same in poetry. Poets like Coleridge and Tennyson just simply cannot be replaced. They are sui generis and give particular pleasures that no-one else does. There are other good poets but to miss out of Tennyson and Coleridge is to miss out on much of the pleasure that poetry can bring. Tennyson died in 1892. Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in 1834. And if you like poetry but know nothing of either of those dead white men, you have simply missed out on a great experience.

So I am glad that I went to school when the importance of the culture of the past was still recognized. In the '50s I went to a totally undistinguished Australian country school but came away from it not only with some knowledge of mathematics, chemistry and physics but also a knowledge of the great poets, a basic grasp of Latin and Italian -- and a good introduction to the language and literature of Germany. At age 15 I was even learning to recite and sing Schubert Lieder in the original German. And I knew English language poems by Tennyson and others by heart. And it was also courtesy of my school that, at age 13 or thereabouts, I first heard Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

But most of that will be Greek to young readers today. They have no idea of how much enjoyment and satisfaction has been hidden from them.

So how come I learnt all that highbrow stuff in a country school half a world away from where it originated? It was basically because Britain's very prestigious "public" (meaning private!) schools taught that sort of thing. And because of the acknowledged excellence of such schools, they became a model that everyone wanted to emulate. I was, in short, taught a curriculum not too different from what I would have got at Eton.

But nowadays everything from the past is wrong in our Left-dominated educational system so Eton traditions are the last thing that a "modern" educator would respect.

And yet the past can be so helpful. Readers of novels, for instance, always have the problem that you usually have to read a fair bit of a novel before you know whether it is any good. Without guidance of some sort you cannot know in advance whether a novel is worth reading and you can waste a lot of time on something that in the end gives you nothing.

But classic novels are classics because lots of people have found them good over a long period of time and recommended them to others. They are the sort of book of which people have long said: "You MUST read ...". So knowing which are the classic novels can greatly upgrade the pleasure you get out of reading.

For instance, I greatly enjoyed reading many years ago what some say is only the second novel ever written in English -- "Joseph Andrews" by Fielding. Can anybody who has read that book forget "Madam Slipslop"? I cannot. Sometimes a classic novel has great insights but it is always entertaining. And fortunately, you can get a reading list of great novels and enjoy them.

It's not so simple with poetry. The great pleasure of poetry is not to read it just once but to KNOW it. And that means to know at least some of it by heart. If you do, you will often recite it, either out loud or just in your head. And you will enjoy doing that. But there's the difficulty: The older you get the harder it is to memorize things. Anything that needs memorizing basically has to be done when you are young -- preferably at school. So if you were never taught any of the great classic poems at school, the pleasure of poetry has basically been ripped away from you. Sorry. But that's it. If you want to try yourself out, here is a famous but short poem by Tennyson. It's a lament over the death of his homosexual lover. The Left seem to think they have invented homosexuality recently. They have not.

Break, Break, Break

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

It's a wonderful and heartfelt poem by a master of the English language. I learnt it at school.

And then there is music. Fortunately, the simpler music from the past has been much revived by the folk music movement -- so remains accessible regardless of your education. It was the folkies who introduced to "Cutty Wren", written over 200 years ago. If you know that song can you ever forget "John the red nose"? I cannot.

But some of the slightly more complex songs from the past should also be enjoyable to many. I think particularly of madrigals. They were once taught as part of a good education. In some private schools they still are. Take Monteverdi's Chiome d' Oro ("Tresses of gold"). It's a love song to a lady with blonde hair! A not unfamiliar idea, though probably politically incorrect these days. The many ladies who blond their hair these days would sympathize. A good performance here. It's wonderful. Monteverdi wrote it around 400 years ago. Words translated from the Italian here.

And that brings me to another important cultural element: languages. If you learn (say) German at school you will almost certainly never get to the point of being able to have a reasonable conversation in it. That is not the point. It is much more likely that you WILL get to the point where you can make some fist of reading texts in that language. And that IS useful.

Translating plain text into English from another language is difficult enough but translating a work of art into English is just about impossible. The translation will never be as gracious as the original. That came home forcefully to me when I was reading the translation of Chiome d' Oro. Italian was one of the languages I studied in my schooldays and the translation of Chiome d' Oro is nowhere as magical as the original Italian. Every Italian would agree with me on that! You just miss so much if your cultural awareness is limited to English.

All that came back to me recently when Anne asked me "Who is this Goethe fella?". Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is of course Germany's most famous and beloved poet. And seeing that he wrote in the land of music, it is no surprise that his poems have been set to music -- by Hugo Wolf, Franz Schubert and others. Some of Schubert's most famous Lieder are to texts written by Goethe. So I was able to introduce Anne to Goethe via the Schubert Lieder.

So, for the benefit of anybody reading this who might have an interest in classical music let me link to just two of the songs I found. Let me revisit some things that it has been my great good fortune to enjoy for nearly 60 years.

There is for instance here a good rendition of Gretchen am Spinnrade set by Schubert. It is a love song. It is from the legend of Faust, the man who sold his soul to the Devil. Faust wanted Gretchen so the Devil made her fall frantically and hopelessly in love with him. The song tells of her feelings. A translation from the German:

My peace is gone,

My heart is heavy,

I will find it never

and never more.

Where I do not have him,

That is the grave,

The whole world

Is bitter to me.

My poor head

Is crazy to me,

My poor mind

Is torn apart.

For him only, I look

Out the window

Only for him do I go

Out of the house.

His tall walk,

His noble figure,

His mouth's smile,

His eyes' power,

And his mouth's

Magic flow,

His handclasp,

and ah! his kiss!

My peace is gone,

My heart is heavy,

I will find it never

and never more.

My bosom urges itself

toward him.

Ah, might I grasp

And hold him!

And kiss him,

As I would wish,

At his kisses

I should die!

And if the song is good, just the music Schubert wrote for it is great too. There is an incredibly sensitive performance of it for solo piano by a Chinese lady -- Yuja Wang -- here. What a treasure it is that the East Asians seem to like our classical music even more than we do! If, as seems likely, the Leftists achieve the destruction of our civilization, China will preserve our great cultural treasures.

And, getting back to Goethe, there is Erlkoenig set by Schubert -- one of the most famous of the Schubert Lieder. A version sung by the young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (a famous German baritone) is here -- with English subtitles. The story is of an ill child who is having hallucinations while his father is riding frantically to get the child home. It is very dramatic.

Will the screed above benefit anyone? Probably not. But I still think it concerns things that should be noted down.

Adam Goodes isn’t booed for the colour of his skin. He is booed for acting like a pillock

The controversy over part-Aboriginal footballer Adam Goodes continues. The crowds boo him a lot and the powers that be are trying to stop that. It has just been handed down from on high that such booing is "racist".

What the wise-heads are ignoring is that Goodes is aggressive, confrontational and a whiner. He has done a lot to make himself unpopular. He recently did some sort of Aboriginal war dance on the football field, complete with an imaginary spear thrown in the direction of the opposing fans -- Not exactly the "mature discussion about the state of race relations in this country" that his Leftist supporters have called for.

The latest episode in the uproar is here. It seems that he just has to run onto the field now to get booed. He has made himself an oppositional figure.

MIRANDA DEVINE (below) summed Goodes up pretty well a month ago. I am not sure why she uses British slang but "pillock" translates roughly into American slang as "jerk". Old-fashioned Australians might say "galah".

I’m sorry, but people are not booing Adam Goodes because he’s Aboriginal. They’re booing him because he acts like a pillock from time to time. And if Sydney Swans CEO Andrew Ireland is genuinely interested in race relations then he shouldn’t cry “racist” with no evidence.

It’s obvious to any footy-lover that the fans boo Goodes because:

1. It’s become a thing;

2. He deliberately taunts opposition fans;

3. He is accused of staging for free kicks, in contravention of the rules of fair play

4. No one has forgotten how he singled out a 13 year old girl in the Collingwood crowd and sicced security onto her after she called him an “ape”;

5. He was rewarded for outing this powerless little girl with the honour of Australian of the Year which he then turned into a grievance pulpit to bag Australia as a racist nation.

Unlike most sports gurus in this town, I loved Goodes’ indigenous war dance last month as the Swans beat Carlton. For one thing, it’s about time we beat the Kiwis and their haka at their own game.

For another, he just did it so well. Bravo, I say. He stole the show.

But he also served it up to the opposition fans, deliberately riling them up. That’s what he does.

So when he gets booed, it’s just the crowd’s natural response to his invitation. It’s a tough game that Goodes started and only he can finish.

But for sports administrators and sanctimonious journalists to denounce the crowds as somehow anti-Aboriginal is the real racism. It’s that sort of patronising victim-pandering that holds Aboriginals down.

If Adam Goodes wants to be a pillock, good for him. He will be booed like any other pillock, no matter what the colour of their skin.

Irving's view that the Anglo-American air-raids on Hamburg and Dresden in the closing phases of WWII were a war-crime is not unusual. A wide range of people see it that way. The raids killed a lot of civilians with little obvious effect or hope of effect on the German war-effort

And Irving is actually a very knowlegeable historian on Germany in the '30s and '40s. He was the only one able to identify the Kujau "diaries" as a fake from the get-go

Many people have suggested that he is more a provocateur than anything else and I agree with that. He loves publicity and outraging people -- and his claims have got him heaps of that. He has travelled the world for decades generating controversy wherever he goes. One of his provocations was to have his car painted brown and then declare the color as "N*gger brown". He undoubtedly enjoyed the howls over that.

So I am inclined to think that his minimization of the death camps is mainly a stunt designed to get people to adopt a more critical and hence a hopefully more balanced view of WWII. And the need for a more balanced view is huge. Just the claim that Hitler was "right-wing" is a towering lie

Sadly, however, it is only very marginal people who are willing to listen to him. He does not himself appear to be a member of any extremist group

Convicted Holocaust denier David Irving addressed fascist sympathisers and neo Nazis at a secret meeting in London yesterday.

Irving, a historian who famously lost a libel case after denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers, was the star speaker at an event that attracted an audience of 120 Right-wing sympathisers, including women and teenagers.

Behind closed doors at a four-star hotel in South Kensington, the discredited author gave a speech condemning the Second World War Allied bombing campaign over Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe as ‘a war crime’.

Irving’s contentious speech was titled: ‘Saturation Bombing in World War II – who is to blame?’

An invitation to the event, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, states: ‘David Irving is the world’s MOST respected historian, he’s the world’s TOP expert on World War II.’

But he was widely discredited after his high-profile libel trial and being sentenced to three years imprisonment by an Austrian court in 2006 for denying the Holocaust.

The secret meeting will add to concerns that far-Right groups are trying to garner support in London and Europe amid a rise in austerity and Islamic terrorism.

It comes just three months after The Mail on Sunday exposed a similar meeting of far-Right figures from around the world, organised by the same group, who call themselves the London Forum.

Anti-fascist campaigner Gerry Gable condemned Irving’s appearance at the latest in a ‘growing series of closed international far-Right extremist conferences’.

Also present was Arkadiusz Rzepinski, leader of the Polish nationalist party, NOP, in England.

The invitation told those wishing to attend the meeting to call a mobile number at 8am yesterday. Those who rang were told to meet at South Kensington Tube station at 11am, where they were greeted by retired teacher and known fascist supporter Michael Woodbridge.

They were then led to the four-star Rembrandt Hotel, opposite the Victoria and Albert museum.

Attendees filed into the St James function room, which the group had booked out in a different name, from 11.30am – some wearing tweed and blazers, others in khaki trousers and black T-shirts with the logo of fascists groups including the far-Right Greek group Golden Dawn.

Among the paying attendees were British National Party members and Polish nationalist skinheads wearing camouflage – complete with boots and chains – who filed through the lobby past bemused hotel guests. About 10 women attended and one man brought his teenage daughter.

In 1996, Irving sued Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin books for defamation after being called a Holocaust denier. Irving lost the very high-profile case, which cost him a reported £2 million.

At the trial the judge said Irving had deliberately misinterpreted and distorted facts. The judge said: ‘It is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.’

In parts of Europe Holocaust denial is a criminal offence and in 2006, an Austrian court sentenced Irving to three years in prison after he made speeches denying the Nazis used gas chambers. He later said he had revised some of his views.

The respected historian and broadcaster Andrew Roberts said: ‘It is depressing that such a meeting should take place in the 21st Century. The idea of treating David Irving as a historian at all is absurd.

‘He doesn’t have the right to call himself that. Historians think of him as a Nazi propagandist and they have the backing of the High Court.’

Speaking in German, with translation provided by Irving, Melaouhi told the crowd about his time working as a prison nurse. He attended to Hess between 1982 and 1987 when Hess was held prisoner in Spandau, Germany, for war crimes.

Hess, Hitler’s deputy who during the Second World War was held prisoner after his plane crashed in Scotland in 1941, hanged himself in 1987. Melaouhi claimed Hess was murdered and released a book about him, describing him as ‘a man of great vision, intelligence and compassion’.

In April, we exposed a similar meeting of the London Forum where the star speaker was Spanish self-confessed Nazi Pedro Varela.

He was arrested in Austria for praising Hitler in 1992 and declared to a baying crowd in Madrid on the centenary of the Fuhrer’s birthday: ‘There were never any gas chambers in Auschwitz.’

Also present was America’s leading peddler of revisionism, Mark Weber, 63, director of the right-wing Institute for Historical Review.

Gerry Gable of anti-fascist magazine Searchlight said: ‘This conference is another piece of evidence of a growing series of closed international far-right extremist Conferences.

‘The core movers range from elderly Holocaust deniers to well-educated men and women who are being trained in ideologies of hate and being made ready for potential acts of terrorism.’

I hesitated for some time before ordering this Singspiel. I read the synopsis and was not impressed: Too complicated and not set in an operetta-type setting. But the music was by Strauss II so I ordered it.

And I disliked it from the beginning. The surrealist staging was way outside my liking. I guess some people find it amusing or interesting but I just found it tedious. A NYC writer felt the same. He wrote:

"David Pountney’s production is not attuned to the bulk of the work, which can hardly breathe under the weight of his heavy symbolism and the heavy, enormous sets"

I think Pountney is one of the many directors of stage performances these days who is trying to show how smart HE is rather than how good the work is. Despicable and boring. I paid to see the work of Strauss, not the work of Pountney. I will order nothing more if he is part of it

But I kept on watching, all the while keeping an eye on the track numbers. I have often found that the initial tracks of an operetta DVD are very skippable so I was looking for a point in the show that seemed a good starting point for me. And I did find one! Track 14, about half of the way through the show. From that point on it became closer to a normal operetta, even having quite a few laughs. And the customary two happy couples at the end, of course. With a lot of cuts to the many slow-moving bits and a naturalistic setting, it could be quite a reasonable operetta.

And the plot was not really as complicated as it appeared to be. The story is that a soldier killed his brother in a battle of the terrible "30 years" war that raged in Central and Western Europe during the 17th century. He was so grief-stricken at what he had done that he put his eldest son into a monastery and retired with his little son into the forest to lead the life of a religious hermit.

But the little son eventually grew up and was taken back into society as an ingenue. Meanwhile it transpired that the father and son were of noble birth and were wanted for the purposes of marrying into another noble and rich family. But nobody knew where the father was and nobody knew who the son was. So a couple of other claimants emerged wanting to marry the rich bride.

They were discredited, however, and we eventually found out who the son was. And that simplified everything so that, after a few complications, everybody got married to the spouse of their choice. Quite a simple plot, basically, and quite in operetta style.

The involvement of Swedes in what was basically a German civil war may seem odd to some but is good history. Der Schwed did indeed take part. Protestant King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden did lead his troops South to help the German Protestants, having a considerable influence on the outcome. He could in fact be said to have saved Protestantism in Germany.

I watched the show three times but felt that there was nothing in it that would draw me back to it so I gave the DVD away: No great arias, no great singing, not much in the way of jokes and repellent staging. It's just not jolly. But Martina Jancova as Tilly is attractive and acted well, while Piotr Beczala is a classic love-stricken tenor. Some other operettas I have watched innumerable times. When watching Wienerblut, for instance, I start laughing long before the punchlines of the jokes arrive.

An excerpt from Simpliciushere -- with subtitles! Judge for yourself. It's just bombast.

The wail below is written by a lawyer, not a social scientist -- and shows no knowledge of the people concerned at all. All he knows is how to look up simple statistics. When he finds that they look bad what does he do? Does he ask why? There's no sign of it. He just seems to to assume that we are all somehow at fault. That makes him a good Leftist but also what Australians call a drongo -- very stupid.

So as someone who has written quite a lot in the academic journals on race-relations, sociology and criminology, let me point out what is really going on.

Before the arrival of the white man, Aborigines were well adapted to a stone-age life. They had been adapting to it for around 50,000 years so the adaptation was extreme. Their visuo-spatial abilities were (and are) simply wonderful. Such adaptations helped them to capture and eat furry animals. But adaptations favourable to stone-age life are not at all suited to modern Western society. People originally from the Eurasian continent evolved very differently. The much larger population there produced innovation -- and that gave us the modern world.

So how are Aborigines disadvantaged in Australia today? The mother and father of their handicaps is low IQ. They are the race with the world's second lowest measured IQ (South African bushmen are the lowest). They survived by sharpening their perceptual abilities, not their reasoning abilities -- and basically are therefore very bad at dealing with anything new and complex.

I have known many of them and admire good qualities in them. They are for instance very polite, unaggressive and tend to have a good sense of humour. But some of their qualities are good yet also their undoing. In particular, they have evolved as a sharing culture. When some hunter succeeded in bringing down a big animal, it was shared around in the assurance that other such fortunate kills by others would also be shared around. There was no refrigeration so no other system made sense. You COULD not keep your kill to yourself.

So, like other native peoples (e.g. the Maori) the concept of private property is just not there in them. If you want something it seems simply right and just to take it, regardless of a property claim that someone else might have on it. I have seen it happen.

An Aborigine in fact just CANNOT keep substantial assets to himself. He must share any windfall, even if that windfall is in fact the proceeds of his own hard work. So you can see how strongly our concept of theft clashes with Aboriginal instincts.

Then there is the alcohol problem. We have had perhaps 60,000 years to learn how to handle our booze. And even then we sometimes do a rather bad job of it. But Aborigines never had alcohol until the white man came. So their use of alcohol is often catastrophic and lies behind perhaps the majority of their arrests.

I could say much more but the sad truth is, I think, clear: Aborigines are just not adapted to the world in which they now find themselves -- so are constantly breaking its rules. All that we CAN do is to enforces the rules. If we exempted Aborigines we would produce huge uproar and disruption. As it is, some judges DO punish Aboriginal infractions more lightly -- but that DOES produce big criticism. Physical abuse of women and children -- sometimes extreme abuse of women and children -- is a big sub-set of Aboriginal crime. Do we WANT to condone that?With pitifully simplistic thinking, the drongo below says that better education is needed for Aborigines. Does he have any idea how hard and how unsuccessfully many governments have tried to get Aboriginal children into school? And how is education going to change attributes built up over thousands of generations anyway?Everything that could be tried to make Aboriginal behaviour more adaptive has been tried and has failed -- from paternalism to giving them maximum autonomy. You won't undo millennia of evolution just by wishing it. The only thing that has ever had much success is when the missionaries ran Aboriginal settlements. Aborigines are a very spiritual people so religion does influence them. But bringing the missionaries back would be impossible. So Aborigines will continue to violate our rules and will continue to be treated like other breakers of the rules -- often by imprisonment

They are locked up often because they often do wrong things. There is no other reason

The US might be the home of mass incarceration – and it is, with 5 per cent of the world's people, it has a quarter of the world's inmates – but America has nothing on Australia in its enthusiasm for disproportionately locking up black people.

Indigenous Australians are imprisoned at a rate 13 times that of other Australians, according to figures collated by the Productivity Commission. That's not 13 per cent higher, or twice as high, but 13 times the rate, 1300 per cent of the rate for the rest of the population. At any one time, over 2 per cent of the Indigenous population is locked up, which doesn't remotely compare with the figure for the rest of us.

The effect of that proportion of people out of one group over time is almost unfathomable, the disruption to the prisoners' lives, their futures, their families.

It's not as if this is a new problem, but it's a rapidly deteriorating one. In 2000, the Indigenous imprisonment rate was merely 8 times as high. Those where the golden days.

So not only do we jail Indigenous people at a far higher rate than even the US imprisons black men, we're speeding things up, putting a greater proportion away. We're increasing this most self-defeating of gaps.

A particular point of Australian difference is our ability to do it harsher for children. For young people, who are meant to be locked up only as an absolute last resort, Indigenous children are jailed at a rate 24 times that of other children.

When Obama turns his attention to a justice system that seems anything but colour blind, the world listens. When Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commissioner, late last year proved Aboriginal incarceration to be every bit the catastrophe he labelled it, Australia scarcely rolled its eyes. Most didn't even notice.

His figures put the difference in rates at 15 times, and found the reoffending rate for children in detention – 58 per cent within 10 years – was higher than the proportion of children who stayed at school until year 12. "We do better at keeping Aboriginal people in prison than in school," Mr Gooda told the ABC.

If most of us continue to ignore this catastrophe, as the country seems determined to do, we will deepen this social disaster. Every year it gets worse, or merely stays the same, or only marginally improves, is another year squandering the potential of an enormous fraction of the Indigenous population and wasting hundreds of millions across the country on unnecessary incarceration.

The Productivity Commission called out four major factors contributing to this shameful reality – education, drugs, child neglect and employment. We need to fix all of them, but surely education is the low-hanging fruit.

Cutting education reforms, like the short-lived Gonski package, is one way to perpetuate the catastrophe. The absence of opportunity leads, for far too many, to the absence of anything but a life hurt by crime – as both victim and perpetrator.

Behind our "Western" heart

As the name of this blog implies, we have always welcomed contributors and readers from anywhere in the Western world. But there is also something else behind the name. The blog originated in Australia and most contributions come from Australia. And that is very fitting. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart -- and you will see that in the posts appearing here. Events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Some brief observations about Leftism

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone. If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him. If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down. If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!) If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left.

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among people who should know better, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

“Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state – capitalism frees them.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were.

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in a MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

You can email me (John Ray) here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)